Wednesday, 5 November 2014

DOVE SI TROVE IL MOSTRO? - THE WORLD CUP IN THE NORTH EAST. PART ONE.

Italy fans at Roker Park get some help from a local

In 2006 I wrote an extended essay for 1966 Uncovered, Peter Robinson and Doug Cheeseman's beautifully illustrated book about the 1966 World Cup. This is an edited version of the section covering the North East. The first part deals with the build up to the tournament. A couple of further pieces on the games will follow.

If the World Cup of 1966 had
bothered to have a slogan it might have been: “The Football World Cup – It’s
Here If You Want It”. That at least is the impression you get looking back from
our own hype-obsessed era. England, it goes without saying, was a very
different place in those days. This was the country featured
in Don’t Look Back, D A Pennebaker’s
documentary account of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, a place where even the coolest
pop music was presided over by men with handlebar moustaches and regimental
ties, and the technical side of things was in the slightly bewildered hands of
a couple of elderly blokes in brown overalls who would attempt to fix just
about anything with garden twine and fish-scented glue.

It should be noted that in
Britain – the home nations having studiously avoided pre-War tournaments for
fear of what might occur to our footballers if they came into prolonged contact with foreigners -
the Mundial wasn’t quite the big deal it has since become. Indeed, when Dennis
Howell, the newly appointed Minister with Special Responsibility for Sport, raised the
topic with Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson he found himself having to explaini what
the World Cup was.

The wartime generation were
not much given to hyperbole and football was still a game. When Wilson
eventually understood the importance of the tournament he allocated
£500,000 to fund necessary ground improvements - a sum considered so outlandish
by senior civil servants some suggested that when the public learned of it they
would bring down the government in protest.

BAOC Air Hostesses model the kits of the competing nations

The draw for the World Cup
finals took place at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington on January 6th
1966. It was televised across Western Europe and in all the participating
nations with the exception of North Korea. Of the 800 people in attendance, 400
were reporters. The official FA report would later summarise event in
characteristic Little Englanders terms: ‘the babble of foreign tongues from the
radio commentators in the gallery caused some inconvenience’.

Fifa had implemented a
complex system of seedings that effectively separated not only the two
favourites - the holders, Brazil and the hosts – but also ensured that South
American countries wouldn’t meet in the group stages and that ‘Latin European
countries’ would likewise be kept apart. By such means, the organisers hoped to
give each four-team group a whiff of the exotic and ‘all-round spectator
appeal’.

For Sunderland and Middlesbrough, hosts of Group Four, this meant
Italy, Chile, the Soviet Union and North Korea. An interesting mixture
culturally for sure, but it seemed no more likely to set the
pulses of local football fans racing than a mug of Camp coffee.

Things would turn out a
little differently, of course, but initially there was a definite sense of
anti-climax. This was a pity becasue in the north-east more than anywhere else in
England, the local organisers had truly embraced the World Cup. In Sunderland - HQ of the North East liaison committee - they
had been preparing for an influx of foreign visitors since February 1965. The committee
had printed 21,450 copies of an information brochure on local amenities, 3000
of which were optimistically sent to the Italian FA.

Nobody in the North East knew
quite what to expect. The committee was not sure if it was planning for ‘1,000
overseas fans, or 10,000’. In the end the numbers fell short of both estimates
with official visitor numbers put at 400 Italians, 200 Russians and 50 Chileans.
The only tourists from North Korea were the squad and officials.

Despite the low turnout,
there was - bizarrely - still a shortage of accommodation. When a sudden influx of British-based
Italians overran local hotels and boarding houses the committee appealed on BBC North news for people with spare bedrooms to come forward: 135 gallant citizens
responded and the crisis was averted.

Further problems were caused
by the need for visitors centres. Initially the committee had thought to use
the double-decker bus polling stations that toured Durham pit villages
during elections. However County Durham police – who clearly regarded the World Cup as a bloody
nuisance – vetoed this idea unless a heavy licensing fee was paid. Considering
the price prohibitive, the committee instead set up the visitors centres in
temporary huts.

Interpreters staffed the
visitor centres. On match days they were frequently called in by local
shopkeepers to sort out problems. On one occasion a group of Italian visitors
in Seaburn ‘grew agitated’ when their requests to see the Loch Ness Monster
were met with blank looks, while on another a party of four entered a
restaurant in Sunderland and, after a brief perusal of the menu, asked the owner
to allow them into the kitchen, so they could cook their own dinner.

In Sunderland local shopkeepers were actively encouraged to give their window displays ‘a festive air’,
and 300 sets of souvenir glasses engraved with ‘Sunderland scenes’ were purchased
as gifts for the visiting teams and officials. At the end of the tournament,
the committee reported sadly, they still had 99 sets left.

The official reception for
the visiting squads held at Sunderland on 14th July was a disappointing
affair. The managers of Italy, the Soviet Union and North Korea denied their
players permission to attend. A couple of hundred offcials did arrive but ‘language
difficulties limited the circulation of the guests amongst the townspeople’.

The sense of anti-climax was
also felt at Seaham Hall where a special overseas visitors' club had been
established. Sadly uptake of the free membership was limited. Organizers reported
that things might have been different had it not been for the Cold War, many
Soviet visitors arriving only to turn around and leave when they were asked to
fill out a membership form. ‘We explained that it was merely a formality, but
suspicions about our motives could not often be allayed,’ the committee recorded.

The authorities had actually
gone out of their way to make the visitors from behind the Iron Curtain
welcome. The Empire Theatre in Sunderland engaged the services of the Georgian
State Dance Company for the duration of the tournament. The troupe proved a
massive hit, drawing an aggregate audience of 22,000 people – more than watched
many of the football matches.

Teesside too offered an
international Eisteddfod. For visitors whose taste didn’t run to folk dancing
and traditional songs, the Club Fiesta in Stockton boasted an ‘international cabaret’ consisting
of Tommy Cooper and Bob Monkhouse. Military bands, greyhound racing, cricket matches,
the occasional ‘Gypsy ensemble’ and an open-air sculpture park completed the
programme of World Cup events along the Tees.

That Middlesbrough was
hosting World Cup matches at all was something a coup for the town. Newcastle,
the more obvious choice as a venue, had been passed over. Newcastle United were
locked in an acrimonious dispute with the council over the lease of St James’
Park and were reluctant to carry out the remedial building work required.

It was a welcome boost for
Middlesbrough who had just been relegated to Division Three for the first time
in their history. The Ayresome Park pitch was a byword for grassy luxury and
widely regarded as the best in England, but the ground itself was in poor
condition. Indeed, one Boro director, Charles Amer, described it as being in ‘a
state of total disrepair’. Luckily Mr Amer owned a building firm and they were
more than happy to take on the task of bringing the dilapidated old ground up
to the mark.Barriers on the terraces
were strengthened, new seating installed in several stands and a hospitality
suite for Fifa dignitaries was shoehorned into an area under the North Stand
despite ‘some trouble with the sewers’.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.